Identity Management in the Cloud

This article, called “ID Management In the World of Cloud Services” (and a related podcast) is quite interesting, as it is thought provoking.

The advent of cloud services and services on demand is indeed likely to change the identity management landscape: most of current identity management solutions are focused on the enterprise and/or a very controlled, static environment. User-centric identity management solutions (such as various federated identity management) also make some assumptions on the involved parties (e.g. SP, IdP parties) and their related services.

In a world where services are offered on demand, in the cloud and they can continuously evolve, some of these models are going to be challenged, for example, in terms of trust assumptions, privacy implications and operational aspects of authentication and authorization.

Is anybody aware of studies in this space? What is your view?

--- NOTE: my original HP blog can be found here ---